Trans-Pacific Partnership

By Jim Carey

In November of 2015, after years of secret meetings, the Obama administration released a version of the 12 nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreements. This September they initiated a full-court press, with the assistance of the six hundred corporate lobbyists involved in writing the TPP, to pressure Congress and get a YES vote for the TPP after the November 8 election during the lame duck session.

Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, Elizabeth Warren, and over 200 leading economics and law professors have made a very compelling argument for a NO vote: “Were the TPP to go into place, literally thousands of multinational corporations would be newly empowered to sue the US government in front of panels of three corporate appointed attorneys, who could then order the government to pay unlimited sums of money. That sum would include all future expected profits that would be lost by those corporations. The US taxpayers will pay the bill. All the corporations have to do is convince those tribunal lawyers that some US federal, state, local law, regulation, court ruling, government action undermines the new rights and privileges that the TPP will grant them. Only these non-elected corporate lawyers will make the decision. There will be no limit on how much they can order taxpayers to pay and there will be no appeal from the decision of these corporate tribunal panels… . If the TPP were to go into effect, literally overnight the US will face liability attacks by 9,000 multinational corporations, who currently have no ability to sue the US. Some of these companies are the big Japanese manufacturing and financial firms and the Australian financial, mining, and timber companies.”

What can we do? In your browser, type “citizen.org/TPP.” Learn how TPP will expand powers for the corporations to attack our environmental and health safeguards, make it easier for big corporations to ship our jobs overseas, pushing down our wages and increasing income inequality, and jack up the cost of medicines by giving big pharmaceutical corporations new monopoly rights to keep lower cost generic drugs off the market. Ask your elected representative if ​the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA)—both of which would have caused damage to the free flow of information and both of which were defeated in Congress in January 2012—are now incorporated into the TPP. Are the TPP tribunals a bold corporate attack on the sovereign rights of nations? It’s clear to most that the two main political parties and the media seem to represent a minority of the people who have a majority of the money. The question remains: Will Americans be silent as their legislators debate whether or not to allow this Trojan Horseto unload its gifts to the 1% and the multinational corporations that feed their treasuries?

On Monday we will show two videos on the TPP, followed by an open discussion. Our events are free. Join us.